


M-R-TL

by LindseyTanner



Category: Original Work
Genre: Girl - Freeform, Immortal, Robot, Science, Science Fiction, sci fi, scientist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:10:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13832925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LindseyTanner/pseuds/LindseyTanner
Summary: Plane crashes, immortal robots, and cheeseburgers.





	M-R-TL

M-R-TL

by Lindsey Tanner

 

“A woman has been found alive and unharmed in the middle of this plane crash. Rescue personnel found her sitting among the twisted metal and charred seats of the plane. She was the only survivor.” The television showed orange seat stuffing that littered the ground among suitcases and empty cans of soda, and then the woman, who looked to be in her late teens.

“She’s walking past us now. She looks untouched!” Indeed, not a strand of her light brown hair was out of place, nor was her pale makeup smudged, but her sky blue dress was wrinkled a little. She was wrapped in a red towel, too, and the reporters and cameras crammed together to get a good look at her.

“How did you survive the crash?” asked a reporter, holding a microphone out to her with his finger on the headset in his ear.

“Can’t everyone?”

 

Meanwhile, the CDC investigated a cheeseburger.

 

My apartment doorbell rang and I got up to answer it. I looked out the window to see the lady from the plane crash standing there, and I opened the door a little.

“Hi, can I help you?”

“Yes.”

It was really strange, seeing someone who was just on TV right outside my door. “Please, come in. What’s your name?”

“Myrtle,” she said, as she walked in and I closed the door behind her.

“Oh, like the flower!”

“No. It stands for Model Replicator TrueLife, TM.”

“Oh, ah, okay. The, um, the TM is part of it, too?”

“Yes.”

Well, Mom always said a person’s name is the sound most special to them. “Ok, Myrtle. I’m Angela.”

“Pleased to meet you, Angela.”

“Can I offer you some coffee?”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Ok, how about tea?”

“I don’t drink tea.”

“Okay. Can I offer you anything else?”

“Yes.”

“What can I get for you?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

I’m not sure what to make of this lady. She’s standing there perfectly still, hardly even blinking, and her breathing is super-steady, and slower than mine.

“Let’s go sit down,” I say.

 

Kenji had discovered the cheeseburger on his way to the bus station. The injustice of it was what drew his attention. Someone leaving a perfectly good burger out on the sidewalk like garbage. And it was a very perfect-looking burger. Not the sloppy kind you get at the fast food places, but the beautiful, mouthwatering, thick, juicy ones you see on the commercials, laying there like a dead thing. This irked him.

But he didn’t spare it a second thought until he was on his way home from work that evening. He passed it again and doubled back. It was still there, untouched. He decided it was none of his business what the owner of the cheeseburger had done with it, but something tickled the back of his mind.

He passed it the next morning and the tickle grew to an itch. Why hadn’t it been eaten? Surely some feral cat or another would have at least taken a bite out of it. Maybe it was tainted. He continued to the bus station.

That evening, when he passed the burger for the fourth time, he decided it was his business after all. He was a junior deputy of the CDC, and if restaurants were serving food that wasn’t fit for a rat to eat, well, he would have to launch an investigation. He kept an eye on it for the next week. Nothing, not even an ant, touched it. It did not spoil, despite the August heat, which creeped him out the most.

Finally, Monday morning, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He donned a double layer of blue latex gloves and an inside-out plastic baggie. Gingerly, he picked up the burger through the bag, pulled the bag over the burger, sealed it shut, and held it up to the light.

Every facet of it was perfect. The lettuce was bright green, the melted cheese oozed over the meat patty, and the bread was as soft as if it had just come out of the oven.

He thought that perhaps someone was playing a trick on him. He poked the burger with his gloved finger. It squelched and sprang back to normal. Kenji stuck it in his briefcase.

 

The lady’s dress lifted up slightly as she sat down on the couch, and I could see a silver tattoo on her leg that said M-R-TL.

“So that must have been pretty traumatic, surviving that plane crash,” I said. “You don’t look hurt, but maybe you should go to the hospital.”

“No.”

“Okay, maybe you should see a psychologist, to help you through what happened.”

“No.”

“Well, that’s your choice. Are you sure you don’t want anything? You must be hungry if you walked here; the crash site is a few miles away.”

“I am sure. Artificial life forms cannot process your food, and you cannot process mine.”

“Excuse me, what?”

 

Kenji plopped the thing on his desk at work. It sat there, pristine. He examined it at all angles inside the bag, and then returned it to its spot on his desk, leaned back in his red rolling chair, and crossed his arms.

Jerry, his co-worker, wandered in with a Styrofoam cup of stale coffee. He’d been hired for his lack of a sense of smell. He worked around spoiled food, rotting corpses, and that sort of thing. He stopped at Kenji’s desk.

“Forgot your lunch bag?” he asked, pointing at the government-issued plastic bag.

“Not quite,” said Kenji. “Tell me, does anything strike you as odd about this burger?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“I wish it was.”

“Well,” said Jerry. “It’s odd that it isn’t in my stomach. It looks delicious.”

“What if I told you this burger had sat for a little over a week in the hot sun, battling the elements on the street?”

“Is it plastic?”

“Not as far as I can tell. I’m going to run some tests on it.”

“Yeah, you do that. I’ve got a bird flu investigation to take care of.” He sauntered off.

When Kenji opened the bag, the meat smelled fresh; there was no odor of rot or decay. He ran test after test on the burger—every part of it: the bun, lettuce, ketchup, mustard, pickles, meat, onions, everything, even the paper it had sat on. Everything short of eating it himself.

 

“You’re a what?” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of disbelief.

“I am an artificial life form.”

“You can’t be. We aren’t advanced enough. We don’t have that technology yet. And you’re too real-looking.”

“I was created to be.”

“So, what, you just popped out of the Matrix?”

“What is the Matrix?”

“You’re a computer program, and you’ve never heard of the Matrix?”

“Yes.”

“Are you connected to the internet?”

“Yes.”

“Then what do you use it for?”

“Updates, storage, and information.”

“So if I asked you to, you could look up the Matrix movie.”

“Yes.”

“But you won’t actually do that until I ask you to.”

“Yes.”

“Huh. What’s your data limit?”

“Unlimited. All the time, anywhere, including underground and into space, within satellite range.”

Wow. Useful. I needed someone like that around the house… no, I wasn’t thinking big enough. The robot had to be worth millions. I could sell it, or sell use of it.

No. I couldn’t use someone like that; it’s wrong.

But she wasn’t someone, was she? She was something. She acted and sounded like a robot, and she said herself that she was one.

 “What else can you do?”

“I can create immortal life.”

 

Kenji practically sprinted back to the office after lunch and burst through the front door. He leaned against the wall and waited until he stopped shaking. He’d hardly eaten anything, he was so worried about the burger.

“What’s wrong?” asked the receptionist, Aissa, who had her hand over the phone speaker.

“There was a wasp nest outside,” said Kenji, “I’m highly allergic.”

“Oh.” she returned to her conversation. When he felt steady enough to walk, Kenji went to his office.  He closed the door and checked the ceiling, even though it did not have, and had never had, a camera in it. He had his key in his hand and was about to take the burger out when someone knocked at the door. For a wild moment, he debated ignoring it, but then he realized that they had probably seen him come in. He had made no attempt to hide. He took a deep breath and opened the door. Jerry stood there dressed in a HAZMAT suit, holding his usual cup of stale coffee. Kenji realized Jerry probably thought it was made fresh before he got there, and was not left over from the day before.  

“How’s the burger doing?” he asked

“Don’t know yet,” said Kenji. “Let’s see.”

He unlocked the desk drawer and pulled out the food item, hoping all the while that Jerry had to be somewhere soon, and had just stopped by to check on the experiment.

Pristine. Entirely too pristine. After all the experiments, all the injections and chemicals, it was perfect, except for a few spots where Kenji had cut off bits of it for testing. The cuts remained, and the missing pieces remained missing. Otherwise, the burger looked exactly the same.

“That’s weird,” said Jerry, sipping his coffee.

“Yep.”

“Well, I’ve got to be going. There’s been a new development in the bird flu case, and we’re right in the thick of it.”

Jerry walked out of the office, and it was all Kenji could do to not immediately slam and lock the door after him. He counted to twenty, rose from his rolling chair, closed the door, and locked it.

He took a syringe out of one desk drawer and a bag out of the other. The bag was full of stomach acid.

He made sure not to get any of it on his skin. He stuck the burger and injected it with the acid. Then he waited. And waited.

“Really?” he muttered.  Something should have happened. The meat should have done something—decayed, bubbled, anything!

He pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up. At the last minute, he remembered to hide the burger. He put it under some files that he knew no one would go through. He never went through them himself.

Kenji went to the opposite wing of the building for the toxologist's report, and then returned to his desk.  It had arrived sooner than he had expected. Usually, it took at least a week. He suspected that the burger was a nice change of pace for them. The sickly-looking yellow envelope contained a bundle of folded papers, which he scanned through quickly and dropped on his desk, but he paused when he got to the last page.

This was it: their conclusion. His eyes lingered on every word. He was about to find out what was wrong with this sick science experiment.

Our reports show that this item contains… it listed a bunch of chemical names that Kenji skimmed over.

We have concluded that it is most likely a cheeseburger.

He dropped the last paper and it floated to the desk.

That can’t be right.

He dug the burger out from under the files.

It can’t be. He spun the bag to see the burger from all sides.  It sat there, perfect. Eerily perfect. Like a Stepford wife.

Jerry walked by the office door and Kenji stopped him: “I need your help with something.’

“You’re not still worried about that burger are you?”

“Yes, I am. It’s not normal. It could be hazardous.”

“I doubt it.”

“Can you help me anyway? It won’t take long. Better than picking up bird corpses,” he added.

“First of all, I love my every part of my job, including the parts that involve dead birds. Second, yes, fine, if we go somewhere that has food while we’re out.”

“That’s exactly what I was planning.”

 

“You can give people immortality? No way! People have been searching for that ever since they started dying. The fountain of youth can’t be sitting on my couch!”

“No. I can create life that is immortal.”

“What? How does that work?”

“I can synthesise chemicals in configurations that do not degenerate.”

“Why would scientists put that kind of ability inside something that can walk away on its own?”

“We needed to take a plane to a convention and they did not want to pay luggage fees.”

“They couldn’t use grant money for that? And how did you get through the metal detector? Or the x-ray scanning thing?”

“No one would pay until they had a workable prototype. I was built with skin that does not allow metal detectors or x-rays to function properly.”

“Seems like a lot of work just to avoid baggage fees.”

“Yes.”

"I don’t believe you."

"You don’t have to."

"Any of it. The immortality, the airplane. I mean, I believe you were on an airplane because I saw you in the wreckage on the news, and—wait, no, you might have gotten to the crash afterward and sat down in the middle of it. That’s all that means.”

“Would you like me to show you?”

I’d have to make something and then… watch it die. A real test would be to have Myrtle create a human. I’d have to wait years to see if it matured into a thinking being, though. Still, just having a child come from a machine would be amazing. But it would take too long to see if it would really grow up and die of old age, and then what would I do with the kid in the meantime?

No, that plan is too complicated. How about an animal? I would ask Myrtle to create an animal that I would then… kill. I would have to kill the animal to prove one theory wrong and one right. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring a life into this world for the express purpose of killing it. I couldn’t ask Myrtle to do it, either.

I would have to choose something that didn’t live very long. I wanted the results immediately, but I wasn’t willing to go down a dark path to get it.

“What animal or insect has the shortest lifespan?”

“The female Dolania americana has an adult lifespan of five minutes.”

“A what?”

“A mayfly.”

A mayfly. That suited me. I would find out if Myrtle was telling the truth or not in five minutes.

 

Kenji stood outside a large, squat, gray building with a clear plastic bag in his hands, with the burger inside. He’d carried it away from there in that bag, and it would return in the same, and there would be no further investigation by him, or any other authorities. He dropped the bag at the glass double doors of the building and looked up at the sign.

TrueLife Industries.

“Wanna get a bite?" asked Jerry. "I’m thinking chicken.”

Kenji thought about the squelch sound his finger had made in the cheeseburger and his stomach turned. “I think I might actually be a vegetarian.”

 

By evening, I had discovered something very wrong with the mayfly. And that was that nothing was wrong with it.

The mayfly zipped and bobbed around the sunset-lit room. I followed it with my eyes, the rest of me unmoving. I’d looked it up on my laptop. It was the correct species according to all the pictures. The mayfly bumped its head into the window while visions of business deals danced in my head. Camera lights flashed and six—no, seven—no, eight-figure sums of money rained down like a sprinkler from the ceiling fan. I would be rich.

I created life.

Myrtle created life.

Immortal life.

Now what do I do with it? And what do I do with her? I could call the news right away and tell them what’s going on. They’d believe me, especially after their broadcast. I could even text them a picture of her to prove it.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket, opened the camera, and aimed it at her. She was completely in frame, and her image was clear. Recognizable. The only sounds in the room were Myrtle’s steady breathing and the mayfly bumping into the window. My finger hovered over the button.

And then what would happen to her? Would I care? Should I care? She came to me looking for help. Didn’t she? Did she have the capacity to recognize danger and seek to avoid it, or did she find me by chance? Did it matter? By sending her picture, I would put her in danger. But she was just a robot. A thing. Why would I care?

Because it wasn't about her. I put my phone back in my pocket. It wasn't about her at all. It was about me: the human. I opened the door to my apartment and the mayfly zipped out and into the sky. I’d only been making excuses. The default state for humans should be kind, not harmful. Our instincts should be to show love and mercy, not to hurt. I am human, and I choose kindness.

I closed the door and sat back down on the couch next to Myrtle. She looked at me with no emotion, and she breathed as steadily as ever.

“Would you like to stay?” I asked her. “You’re free to leave at any time, but you can stay as long as you’d like.”

“Yes.”

 

 

 

**_“Let’s face it: no one wants to live on Uranus…”_ **

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